Monthly Archives: August 2012

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Bell city officials have screamed bloody murder about disgraced former Bell California Police Chief Randy Adams demand that they fatten his wallet even more at city taxpayer’s expense. The canned ex-chief now bags a tidy 22 grand a month for doing nothing. That’s his retirement pay. That produced loud squeals that officials in public agencies even when they’re fired for cause, or jailed, still scam taxpayers for fat pensions. But that’s the law and those are the rules of the pension game. Adams isn’t getting a red cent more than he’s entitled to no matter how unfair and shameful it may seem.
Now as to Adams demand for nearly a quarter of a million dollars more in severance pay. Again tough luck, the facts and ultimately the law is on his side. The city signed a contract with him requiring it shell out severance pay to him if forced out, and while the amount seems outrageous it’s in line with the ludicrously inflated pay that he received as chief. Again, this was agreed to and signed off on by city officials.

It’s not enough then to argue as the new regime in Bell argues that Adams was canned and any monies paid to him in pension and now his severance demand we had nothing to do with, that was the handiwork of the equally disgraced and for a time jailed previous regime of Bell officials. That argument won’t fly. The agreement to pay Adams was a legal obligation incurred by Bell, and legally has to be honored.

The moral of all this is that as scam prone as California’s pension system is by the legion of fat cat former top public agency employees, it’s the system. Adams didn’t make it, so if he grabs what he’s legally entitled to don’t blame him, again blame the system.

GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney predictably jumped all over the jobs report for July which saw joblessness tick up slightly. He called it a hammer blow for the middle-class. Certainly much has been made of the fact that no president has won reelection since World War II with the jobless rate above 8 percent. That and the report seemed to spell bad news for President Obama. But it’s anything but that. The report also showed a jump in the number of jobs for the month. Some non-partisan economists and financial experts predict a slow but steady trend upward in the job numbers over the next few months. That’s potentially a plus for Obama’s reelection.
But it’s not strictly good or bad job numbers that pretty much determine whether sitting Presidents will continue to sit in the Oval Office or will be sent packing by voters. It’s the timing of the positive or negative numbers. In a look at how six of eight presidents fared since 1948 when the economy hit the skids or appeared to skid, the scorecard for presidents winning and losing because of economic misery is a draw. Three incumbents were beaten and three incumbents beat back their challengers. It came down to whether voters really perceived that their economic plight would stay the same, or get worse, if the incumbent got another four years in the Oval Office.
The winners and losers have been both Republican and Democratic presidents. They have won and lost even when there was widespread public unease over the economy and many voters believed things wouldn’t get any better. The presidents who won had to do and have two crucial things in the face of rising unemployment, recession, inflation, and public grumbles. One is that the economy had to improve or appear to improve immediately before the election. And they had to assure a majority of voters that things would and could get better with them if they stayed in the White House and their opponent couldn’t do any better. Romney and Obama understand that the battle is not so much with the job numbers and the economy’s performance, since the numbers can be spun for and against the incumbent. Obama must drive home the notion with voters that things are and will get better under him in the next four years. Romney’s single-minded aim is convince voters that they won’t. Incumbents and their challengers have played the dance around the economic numbers and voter perceptions repeatedly with mixed results.

Presidents Gerald Ford and Bush Sr. lost the dance. The combination of real and voter perceived economic woe helped sink both of them. In Carter’s case, it helped and hurt. It helped him win when the economy went bad for Ford in 1976. Carter played up that fact and won a narrow victory over Ford. Voters must perceive that the economy will get worse under the incumbent and the challenger has to reinforce public fears that things will get worse.
But four years later, GOP presidential challenger Ronald Reagan turned the tables on Carter. With interest rates soaring , home prices escalating, high unemployment, and a seeming clueless Carter on how to halt the slide, Reagan was able to nail Carter with the enduring question “Are you better off than you were four years ago” during their debate on October 28, 1980. Reagan won in a near landslide. The exact reverse was true for Reagan and Bill Clinton. Reagan’s supply side economics and big tax cuts were credited with igniting a mid-1980s economic boom. Clinton’s tax hike, deficit reduction program, and investment stimulus program, was credited with turning a record deficit into a record surplus and adding millions of new jobs to the rolls.
As Reagan’s vice president, Bush Sr. benefited from his economic policies. In 1988, he won the election. Four years later, when things turned sour he lost. It was not just a bad economy but at the point the economy turns bad in the life of the administration, and the public perception that things will get better or worse. The downturn for Bush Sr. came during the last two years of his term. The last thing that an incumbent wants is for voters to go to the polls with fear and doubt fresh in their minds about the economy.

Bush Sr.’s history did not repeat itself with George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Unemployment was high, and economic growth, as Democrats happily noted, was slower than during Clinton’s second term. But the Clinton record was the stuff of envy and was impossibly hard to match. Bush didn’t have too. There was just enough economic growth and a slightly downward trend in overall unemployment during the last two years of Bush’s first term, to largely mute any Democratic attacks on him for a miserable economy.

Bush took the cue and solemnly pledged the economy would grow even more with his tax cuts, downsizing of government spending, and stepped up drive to deregulate in his second term. If the economic negatives had hit harder in Bush’s last two years, as it did with his father, this could have spelled the same disaster for him as it did for Bush Sr.
The proverbial–it’s the economy stupid–is a hard fact of presidential elections. But history has shown it can work for or against sitting presidents depending on when voters see the economy as improving or failing. That can help or hurt President Obama.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC and a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
During August, The Hutchinson Report will donate proceeds from each column to the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. The proceeds will go to the organization’s Make a Dream Come True Fund Drive. I urge you to join the Hutchinson Report in giving. For more information go to http://www.laupr.org/

I was going through the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Montreal last week and had a moral and political epiphany. There is probably no more appropriate venue for having such experiences. If what human beings did to other human beings during the Holocaust does not touch, open and wound your heart, you are either not paying attention or have no heart.

I know politics and morality usually don’t belong in the same paragraph, no less the same sentence. Still, how we treat other human beings, whether we see the stranger as a fellow human or something totally other, and therefore less worthy than ourselves, has profound ramifications that are both moral and political. One deals with how we feel and the other with what we actually do or tolerate. These should be, in my view, not just related but inseparable.

My epiphany concerned our current hot-button issue of the Dream Act and the embracing or deporting of young Hispanic people who were brought here as infants or children. As with most epiphanies, this was something I already knew, but it was a kind of passive knowledge, not at my moral center where, I believe, it deserved to be.

As I went through the museum, I was reminded with graphic pictures, moving films and horrifying anti-Semitic posters how societies can identify some group as the “other,” as unworthy and non-native and eventually even as non-human.

This did not happen all at once to the Jews. There was an historic context of anti-Semitism; however, most hateful acts in Germany and Austria were done without the cover of law. The persecutions were social, some were church-driven and many were just old bad habits, but they were not given the power and prestige of the state by being in the law.

This began to change in the late 19th Century under Vienna’s mayor Dr. Karl Luegar. He promulgated laws defining who was a Jew and what rights Jews had: Where Jews could work, where they could live, and whether they could leave the country with their own property. He deployed the noose that over the next forty years strangled first the freedom and ultimately the life out of over 6 million people.

This legal defining of a people from not quite belonging to not being citizens to not being people was gradual, yet inexorable. This tragic devolution happened because both Jews and the majority of good and righteous Christians believed that Germany and Austria were too civilized and fundamentally too decent for such outrages to continue. That they could become infinitely worse was literally unthinkable.

Let me be clear that I am not driving another Holocaust up to our door, yet this is a road that history knows too well. I do not anticipate America turning barbarous and rounding up Jews or Hispanics. Still, who foresaw that ethnic Japanese–even American citizens–might be rounded up and interred during WWII? Fear makes us do some not very funny things. We all remember after 9-11 how some Arabs, Muslims and folks who “looked” Arab or Muslim were stopped, questioned and held for no reason other than their physical appearance and our fear.

No, I don’t think we are ready to turn violently xenophobic, but then I didn’t anticipate Arizona passing a law mandating that the legal status of anyone stopped for any infraction must be questioned if their status is suspect. Does anyone doubt that the standard of probable cause for reasonable suspicion will be skin tone and accent? Does anyone think that fair-skinned folks will be forced to show their papers along our Canadian border for letting slip the word, “Eh?”

Some even argue that if people are here without papers they are committing a crime. Maybe, technically. But an element of a crime usually requires intent and the children brought here before the age of consent had no such intent and have no other country. Many do not speak Spanish and have never known another land. To argue their illegitimacy is to start down a well-trod road that begins with marginalization, then goes on to rejection and ends with legal persecution–not just from naked bigotry, but self-righteous bigotry given the cover of the law.

For me, the most chilling and illuminating moment in the museum was a poster that said in German, “Every Jewish Business Means a Real German Business Closes!”

Disturbingly too many people say of these young Hispanics: “They don’t belong here. They are breaking the law by being here. We do not owe them the protection of our Constitution or due process. They are taking our jobs. They are filling our prisons and taking up space in our schools and hospitals.”

Like the Jews of Germany, Hispanics are being damned for assimilating and achieving, as well as for being different and sticking to their own kind. They are being punished and persecuted for fitting in and not fitting in–for being rich or for being poor. It makes no sense. Sadly it doesn’t have to.
2012 Jonathan DobrerJonDobrer@mac.com

So some badminton players have been bad and thrown some games. They played to lose. They did not give their best efforts but instead tried to game the system for later advantage. This differs not at all from NBC’s manipulations of time and drama. They both cynically postponed their best efforts for strategic reasons.

The badminton players figured that if they lost certain first round matches, in the round robin portion of the competition, they could gain some advantage by playing lower-rated teams in the next round. They were thinking tactically–and it wasn’t a bad calculation, it was just not well, as the English would say, “Cricket.”

This was not like throwing a match in professional boxing for the money. They were trying to win the gold but thought they improved their chances by losing early. For their plot and conspiracy, they were booted from the Olympics in shame, as they should have been. And yet, and yet, this was a prelim and the commentators are often praising the wisdom of swimmers and runners for not making their greatest efforts in prelims but saving themselves for the final. They hold back early and accept second or third place to have the legs for the finals. And the difference is? Well, I’m not sure.

I’m also not sure how their strategic calculation not to deliver their best efforts to their paying fans differs from NBC’s not delivering all they could to their viewers on TV and the Internet. They preen and brag about the hours of coverage and the live streaming but they also do not report and convey all they could for strategic reasons. They withhold their best efforts and give us time-altered views and hold content hostage. They make us wait till local prime time to see videos and edit events dishonestly–out of sequence sometimes to build drama. They are journalistically dishonest. Their most egregious transgression (aside from holding opening and closing ceremonies not only hostage but edited) was not showing the floor mat fall of the Russian girl and pretending that the outcome of the Women’s Team Gymnastics was in doubt.

For withholding their best efforts and distorting competition, they, along with the disgraced badminton players, should be sent home and coverage should be left to the BBC.
2012 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

Should Chick-fil-A try perching a bony leg in LA, the politicians would probably think of West Hollywood and Hollywood in general and tell the franchise to take a hike.

But is Chick-fil-A the only outfit to have done dirty and where are the powers that be when other companies and nations start laying eggs? So where were they after the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed much of the area’s wildlife and put some dings in the ecosystem? And where are they when they buy products made in China, which is one of the countries known for human rights violations? They’re putting British Petroleum gas in their cars, as the company has been on a major public relations campaign that has included commercials with people laughing it up on the Bayou and a name change to BP with a green flower logo, or they’re using electronics made in China and donning clothes made there as well.

Yet Chick-fil-A shouldn’t be denied space based on their uber right-wing, Tea Party politics. Instead, they should be granted a permit to build then let the denizens decide whether they want to eat or even picket their quarters.

In a twist of irony, the chain has some gay employees in Alabama and Georgia, of all places, but should the outfit come to a state like California that has anti-discrimination laws in place, then company CEO, Dan Cathy, had better watch out, or he could have a foul discrimination suit on his hands. It might not be enough to make him fly the coop, but it certainly could put a little hitch in his get along.

Liberals and Conservatives may yell and scream at each other; they may demean each other and cast aspersions at one another–and yet, they are not really so different characterologically. In today’s poisoned political climate, both Right and Left take inflexible and absolutist positions. They are remarkably similar in style and in core beliefs about the quasi-sacred status of elements of our Constitution. They just differ on which part to worship and take fundamentalistically.

Given the tragic mass shooting in Colorado, we all know that many Conservatives hold the Second Amendment to be the revealed word of our holy Founders, and they are committed to protecting it come hell, high water or reigns of terror and raining hot lead. They believe that any restriction or limitation is the first slide down a slippery slope leading to gun confiscation and then rapidly to tyranny. To them, “reasonable gun control” is an oxymoron. They believe that government wants ultimately to disarm them. The government wants order and stability and despite our revolutionary heritage, does not want people with guns and the power to resist government’s overreach. They will brook no restrictions.

Liberals, on the other hand, and concerning another amendment, in this case the First, are equally unwilling to compromise. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and prohibits the government from restricting or regulating it. They too believe that their favorite amendment is holy and sacred, and any restriction is also the first slide down the slope. They believe that protecting popular speech is easy, but the First Amendment protects the unpopular opinion and that government, always wanting social stability, will, in the name of order, try to restrict our God-given right to express ourselves.

There are naturally some caveats and exceptions that each side asserts. Pro-gun folks don’t want the “wrong people” to have guns and free speech absolutists do draw some restrictions around political correctness. Yes, I know a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but both sides fail on consistency. Most folks, in the shrinking center of our political discourse, understand that there are reasonable restrictions to both guns and speech. Most Americans don’t want people to be free to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater–or to fire semi-automatic weapons in that same theater.
2012 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

Freedom of speech is not free. On the contrary it is often quite costly. Its cost is related to just how precious it is. When we speak, write or opine on social, political and moral issues, we can alienate people. We can lose friends, jobs and even livelihoods. That is the price of our freedom.

When the head of Chick-Fil-A endorses traditional marriage and bible-based laws, he is well within his rights. He is exercising all of our rights. Members of the public also have rights. We can say nothing or protest. We can line up to support his restaurant or organize a boycott. What we should not do, and must not allow, is for the government to get involved and infringe on anyone’s free speech. For Rahm Emmanuel, the mayor of Chicago, to lobby to keep Chick-Fil-A from getting a business license because they don’t “exemplify Chicago values” is legally and morally dangerous and a terrible and unacceptable over-reaching by government.

Nor am I persuaded by Earl’s argument that they have the right to free speech but underwrote their speech from the wrong purse and therefore Los Angeles has the legal basis to deny them permits. Nonsense. If they broke corporate law, prosecute them. If they discriminate in employing or promoting, bring charges–criminal and civil. However, in the absence of criminal charges, government should stay out of this.

Free speech, as understood from the First Amendment, is trivial if it only protects popular speech. Its importance and precious nature derive from hard cases when it must protect offensive, even obnoxious, speech. This is such a case. Would I hold this same generous position if he had said that his reading of the bible is that God hates Jews or Blacks? Yes. Until he urges acts of violence on the unfavored, I will remain faithful to Voltaire who is quoted as having said, “I disapprove of what you said but will defend to the death your right to say it.” Amen!
2012 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

When Chick-Fil-A hinted that it wanted to open up more of its fast food joints in Boston and Chicago. The mayors of both cities flatly told the company to take a hike. They do not take kindly to a narrow, bigoted, Bible spouting homophobic family run company opening up more shops in their city. Their door slamming response to Chick-Fil-A does raise this question. What would or should L.A. city officials say to Chick-Fil-A if it wanted to open more up shops here. The answer to the “would” part of the question is that city officials would storm the barricades against the company’s expansion.

But what about the “should” part of the question? At first glance that seems a little tougher. The chicken shop owners have loudly and publicly tossed the old Bible canard at homosexuality. That’s their right. The Constitution says so. And since when have businesses been penalized because an owner is a jerk, or because of his or her’s personal bigotry? If it was just a case of the Chick-Fil-A President Dan Cathy hatin’ on gays then city officials would be on shaky ground in trying to deny him the right to do or expand his business in their city.

But fortunately L.A. city officials, as those in Chicago and Boston, don’t have that worry. Chick-Fil-A slammed the door on itself when it was revealed that the parent corporation, not the family, donated millions to a family charity that dumps money into anti-gay groups. That’s not just an individual promoting bigotry, it’s a corporation. That’s verboten. Los Angeles city officials may never be faced with having to deal with what to do about more Chick-Fil-A’s amongst us. But if they do they can and will be on firm ground if they say no–legally.